Tag Archives: uci

UC IRVINE’S JUMPSTART LITERACY FAIR TO BRING BOOKS TO LIFE TO ENCOURAGE

EARLY CHILDHOOD READING ON SATURDAY, MARCH 3 AT HERITAGE MUSEUM IN SANTA ANA

The program works with early childhood educators to reduce achievement gaps for children in underserved communities

Families from across Orange County are expected to attend UC Irvine’s Jumpstart’s free annual Spring Literacy event on Saturday, March 3, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Heritage Museum of Orange County at 3101 W. Harvard St., in Santa Ana. The exciting event supports the development of literacy through STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) activities, readings from children’s authors, activities such as making your own balloon rocket car, science experiments, and other STEAM related activities to encourage an interest in reading among preschool age children.

Jumpstart will give more than 1,000 free books to children who attend the event. Nurses from Santa Ana Unified School District will be present as well to provide free basic health screenings for children. Children’s author Annie Banannie, who brings stories to life with her unique balloon storytelling, will also be at the event. Continue reading→

Five years ago the UCI Symphony Orchestra, led by Maestro Stephen Tucker, adopted the Santa Ana High School (SAHS) Symphony Orchestra. The partnership was designed to build awareness of the university experience to make it a tangible goal for the SAHS students; increase access to arts resources; and cultivate engaged young artists, the Trevor School students, who will become involved citizens in their communities not just in the arts.

For the first time, the UCI Symphony Orchestra will perform a full concert in Santa Ana, continuing the intersection of our two communities for the benefit of both, on Nov. 4, 2016 at 8 p.m. Experience the famous Bill Medley Auditorium, whose namesake is the Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter best known as one-half of The Righteous Brothers and a SAHS alumnus ‘58, to support both schools at this special concert.

Supervisors Spitzer and Do Commend UC Irvine Student Leader Veto on Ban of American Flag

(Orange County, CA) — To show unwavering support for the American flag, Supervisors Todd Spitzer and Andrew Do, both alumni of the University California system, commended the student leaders who vetoed the unwise decision to pass a resolution that banned the flag from being displayed in the lobby of the student government offices.

The Associated Students’ Legislative Council at UC Irvine approved the ban on the flag with a vote of 6-4 on Thursday but the Associated Students’ Executive Cabinet vetoed the ban on a 4-1 vote. The resolution also banned all other nations’ flags from the common lobby area of student council offices. Continue reading→

When Sean Mill heard that the UCI Alumni Association was trying to find a local craft brewery to develop an “Anteater Ale” he immediately thought of a new business that had been approved by the Santa Ana Planning Commission he serves on.

Mill is himself an anteater and as it turns out so is Brandon Fender, the owner and founder of the Good Beer Company – a craft brewery that has opened in Downtown Santa Ana.

Fender started brewing his own beer, at home, as a hobby but he grew to love the process so much that he opened The Good Beer Company, in Downtown Santa Ana, on September 2014. He has a degree in Sociology from UCI but taught himself how to make great beer. Continue reading→

ANAHEIM, Calif. (June 12, 2014) Cities of Anaheim, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach in Orange County, California: In an effort to assist the public in avoiding possible traffic congestion during the visit of President Barack Obama on June 14, the following areas of Orange County should be avoided when possible to prevent travel delays for community members:

(Santa Ana)— The City of Santa Ana and the Santa Ana Partnership—a collaboration of Santa Ana College, Santa Ana Unified School District, California State University, Fullerton; University of California, Irvine; Chapman University; and numerous community organizations—are planning for the launch of the Higher Education Center at the Santa Ana Public Library. The public is invited to the Center’s grand opening on Saturday, May 17 at 1:00 p.m. at the Main Library, located at 26 Civic Center Plaza. Continue reading→

STRAUSS FOUNDATION AWARDS CHRISTINE PHAM $10,000 PUBLIC SERVICE SCHOLARSHIP TO CARRY OUT PROJECT IN HER SENIOR YEAR

The Donald A. Strauss Public Service Scholarship Foundation, established as a memorial to the late Don Strauss of Newport Beach and now designed to award $10,000 scholarships to as many as 15 California college juniors annually, has announced that among the foundation’s new group of recipients is University of California, Irvine student Christine Pham.

The Strauss scholarships fund public-service projects that the students have proposed and will carry out during their senior year. Pham, who hails from Fountain Valley, will create My Healthy Start: an after school program that will educate students from the thirty-six elementary schools of the Santa Ana Unified School District and their parents on proper nutrition and physical activity on a monthly basis. Approximately 34.8% of children living in Santa Ana are obese, one of the highest rates of a city in California and double the national average. By focusing on simple habit changes for proper nutrition and physical activity, this program works to empower families to take care of their health in order to curb the obesity rates. Continue reading→

World AIDS Day is celebrated on December 1st, a day to reflect and remember those who have lost their lives and those who are still living with HIV or AIDS. More than 60 million have been infected with the HIV virus and approximately 30 million people have died of AIDS worldwide. Continue reading→

SANTA ANA – The Orange County District Attorney’s Office (OCDA) will be seeking to have a defendant held without bail for committing a series of arsons after the Irvine Police Department (IPD) discovered e-mails by the defendant detailing plans to murder students and administrators at an Irvine high school. Continue reading→

Tragedy struck tonight, at approximately 6:22 pm, when a 3-year old was struck by a car, in Santa Ana. He died later in a local hospital.

According to the Santa Ana Police Department (SAPD) a family was crossing 5th Street at Bewely and was reportedly holding the hand of their 3 year-old. A passing vehicle struck the 3 year-old and fled the scene.

Witnesses were able to provide a vehicle description and license plate. Santa Ana police officers located the suspect vehicle and suspect at 1300 N. Clinton. The suspect was taken into custody and it appears DUI is possibly a factor. Continue reading→

When George Collins, a past candidate for Santa Ana Mayor, showed up at a Republican Party of Orange County event in Yorba Linda, his aim was to film the comments made by the speakers, and then put them up on his YouTube page. He surely had no idea what was going to happen after he put up the video, which shows Villa Park Council Member Deborah Pauly making very harsh statements about Orange County’s Muslim community.

What set Pauly off was the actions of the Muslim Student Union at the University of California at Irvine (UCI). Eleven Muslim students were arrested during Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech on campus in February. Those 11 students stood up one at a time and yelled during Oren’s presentation and were subsequently detained, according to the O.C. Register.

Michael B. Oren is the State of Israel’s Ambassador to the United States.

A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Orenhas received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.

Ambassador Oren has written extensively for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. His two most recent books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, were both New York Times bestsellers. They won the Los Angeles Times’ History Book of the Year prize, a National Council of the Humanities Award, and the National Jewish Book Award.

Raised in New Jersey, where he was an activist in Zionist youth movements and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabia Games, Ambassador Oren moved to Israel in the 1970s. He served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the paratroopers in the Lebanon War, a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War, and an IDF spokesman during the Second Lebanon War and the Gaza operation in January 2009. He acted as an Israeli Emissary to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, as an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations, and as the government’s director of Inter-Religious Affairs. He has testified before Congress and briefed the White House on Middle Eastern affairs.

Interesting. This guy Oren is no common diplomat. He has a lot of Arab blood on his hands. Now you could argue how that came to be, but the fact is I can understand why Muslim students might not be happy to welcome this man to their campus.

These Muslim students aren’t monsters, I don’t think. They are brave individuals who risked everything for what they thought waas right.

But Pauly thinks they are “unwelcome invaders.” Click here to see the video of her disturbing comments. I would normally embed the video here, but Collins disabled that feature on his YouTube page. He was upset because a Muslim organization used excerpts of his video in their own YouTube video, which was taken down when Collins claimed he had a copyright to the original video.

Collins, like Pauly, is a Republican. She is also a member of the OC GOP’s Executive Committee.

Many Americans now know that it is insensitive to celebrate the Pilgrims, and the Conquistadores, and the other European invaders, who came to the U.S. and wrought so much havoc amongst the Native Americans, here in the U.S. and in Latin America. Over 75 million Native Americans died as a result of the Euro invasion.

In November, a fraternity at UCI thought it was a great idea to hold a “Pilgrims and Indians” party. As you might imagine, many others disagreed with that notion.

Here is M.E.Ch.A. de UC Irvine’s response to this scandal (it should be noted here that Assemblyman Jose Solorio was a member of this organization, when he was a student at UCI):

M.E.Ch.A. de UC Irvine condemns parties that bastardize the cultures of underrepresented students on our campus, such as the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity’s “Pilgrims and Indian” party, which occurred on November 23, 2010. While we recognize the fraternity’s right to free speech, it is not acceptable to do so at the expense of the culture and history of marginalized students. These parties promote cultural insensitivity and lack an understanding of the struggles and oppression connected to holidays such as Thanksgiving. While Thanksgiving was created to appease the American population at the end of the Civil War and it is also representation of the genocide of indigenous people in the United States. No student should be exposed to this kind of representation of their identity and culture, as it fosters a hostile environment on a supposedly safe campus.

M.E.Ch.A de UCI demands a response from Student Affairs and will not accept a “slap on the wrist.” The students responsible for these parties need to be held accountable and should attend a cultural sensitivity training, such as a Reaffirming Ethnic Awareness and Community Harmony (R.E.A.C.H.) workshop in order to challenge their positions of privilege and educate them on the cultures they mock.

M.E.Ch.A stands in solidarity with the American Indian Student Association (AISA) and the Native community in demanding a change in the UCI discrimination policy for these types of events, an increase of Native faculty and an increase in Native American courses. These demands should not be unreasonable nor impossible to achieve on a campus that is supposedly dedicated to the diversity and well being of its students. These demands will not only improve campus climate but also spread awareness to student of color issues and increase the retention of those students.
This is a important matter that cannot be taken lightly or overlooked. We hope you take this situation seriously and take steps to change policy in regards to these parties.

The American Indian Student Association at UCI is asking for your support and solidarity with us in regards to an event that occurred on November 23, 2010. In light of Thanksgiving, the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at UCI decided to throw a “Pilgrims and Indians” party.

As soon as AISA was made aware of this event, it was reported it to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity and an official complaint was filed through the school. While the right steps were taken to ensure that our voices were heard; they were seemingly NOT heard. Although the school administration, faculty, and the fraternity involved were notified about the grievance filed and the situation; the party still went on. Advertisement for the event were still distributed throughout the UCI community through the attached fliers, Ring Road tabling and throughout the internet via a Facebook event. To make matters worse, university shuttles served as transportation for students JUST FOR THIS EVENT!

AISA members have went out of their way to voice their opinion on the issue. Dedicated their time educating and explaining why this event was exceedingly disrespectful to the Native community. Yet AISA members were subjected to seeing students of all stature prancing around adorned in rainbow colored headdresses, skimpy “loin clothes” and warpaint. Making a mockery of our culture and a direct attack on our communities experiences for the sake of entertainment.

As university students and as Native community members, it is not acceptable for us to have to endure these repeated cases of hostility towards us as people of color and Indigenous peoples especially in an educational institution like UC Irvine that advocates its dedication to diversity. This events and others that make a mockery of peoples experiences and identity are not to be tolerated. They create a hostile campus climate for people of color that are not safe and welcoming. That is why we are taking a stand and making sure that our voices are heard at the University of California, Irvine. We will not back down, and though we only have a .01% representation on the UCI campus; our voices are loud. Numerous other cultural and campus organizations stand in solidarity with us. This is not an isolated incident to Natives or other cultural groups, and we demand that this outright racism and disregard for who we are as Indigenous peoples and disrespect of our culture stops immediately.

Have you heard about the terrible, ongoing tragedy in the African country, Darfur? Now you can be part of the solution, by asking your friends and family to join you today in eating yummy food at The Veggie Grill, near UCI, any time from open to close on Sunday January 30th, and be sure to mention that you are there for the fundraiser.

When you order, if you mention “OC for Darfur”, or “Living Ubuntu”, or even just “fundraiser” — 50% of your food & beverage purchases will be donated to us.

Click here to have a look at the Veggie Grill’s diverse and delicious menu offerings.

How do you respond to an event as difficult to understand as a government-sponsored mass murder of part of a country’s civilian population? The United Nations has described Sudan’s western Darfur region as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The conflict flared in 2003 when rebels in Darfur took up arms against the Arab government that had neglected the region. Since then, the Janjaweed, backed by government troops, have carried out widespread killings of civilians. President Bush has condemned the campaign as genocide, and the United Nations has approved the deployment of international peacekeepers in Darfur to create a hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force.